In the midst of a breakdown, a 25-year-old artist abandons her Dublin bedsit to move to her dead grandmother’s decaying bungalow, at the foot of a turbine in the Irish countryside. There she falls slowly, even methodically, apart, pausing to photograph dead animals and birds along the way.

Sara Baume garnered enthusiastic recognition for her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither. What was most exciting about that tale of a lonely man’s relationship with his one-eyed dog was the confidence of the voice, which was at once grounded in a particular character and open to a more universal poetic register. Baume also revealed a remarkable ability to generate narrative pace while eschewing plot, making it enough for the reader to observe a mind observing the world.

Now she’s written about a loner again, this time giving her heroine a richer, more peopled interior life. Frankie has studied art history and retains an encyclopaedic knowledge of the art of the past century. She has unusually functional relationships with her parents, still turning to her mother as a “magic potion” at moments of crisis. And she has a handful of friendships that have nurtured her into adulthood, though she is too diffident to trust in reciprocal affection.

The imagery of the book is fashioned from the scenes and objects that Frankie encounters inside and outside the bungalow. Inside, there is the memorabilia of her childhood: photographs and ornaments that remind her both of her lost grandmother and of her lost childhood self. Encountering them, she learns to reinhabit an earlier version of her body. After a trip to the sea, she leans down to lick the salt water off her chest as she did as a child.

Outside, there are familiar fields and paths, where she charts the shifting light and seasons in intricate detail. She begins to photograph dead creatures as a way of leading herself back to the art she has abandoned, taking aesthetic pleasure in the composition of her pictures. She is also testing her own ability for compassion. Redemption of a muted kind comes when she encounters a badger that has been run over and finds herself experiencing “a final show of concern for a creature other than myself”.

This is material that in the wrong hands might be pretentious or merely dull. In Baume’s telling, though, it’s fascinating, because of the cumulative power of the precise, pleasingly rhythmic sentences, and the unpredictable intelligence of the narrator’s mind. And along the way there are crucial questions raised about how we perceive reality. Should we take as our starting point our own centrality to the world we view? “They are being killed with me; they are being killed for me,” Frankie observes when she starts to notice that small creatures around her are dying at the same time as her life comes incrementally apart.

The book is a reminder of the beauty that can be found when you allow yourself to look slowly and sadly at the world

As an artist, she has been trained to privilege her own perception, in the hope that the thoughts and images that she creates will have a more universal interest and appeal. She’s convinced that other artists have managed to do this. Tracey Emin’s bed, for example, is for her “about tossing beneath the covers, not wanting to get up and yet making everything worse by not getting up”. But she is coming to distrust her own tendency to set herself at the centre of any scene. This leaves her with a dilemma. She suspects that the real artists are people like her mother, who is unusually perspicacious without seeking to create anything out of her observations. Yet she knows that art requires some level of ambition if it’s to be brought into the public sphere.

Art may also require a willingness to question the ordinary that is incompatible with conventional criteria of sanity. One of the most radical aspects of this novel is its challenge to received wisdom about mental illness. In the 1960s, RD Laing and his followers suggested that the supposedly insane might in fact be saner than the supposedly sane. Insanity for Laing was a psychedelic state, mimicked by the effects of LSD. Now Baume makes a similar suggestion but offers a quieter form of insanity, which begins simply with doubting the inherent good of the usual markers of achievement.

Frankie, who has never learned to use a washing machine or achieved any worldly success, who suffers from frequent paranoid terror and who spends hours of every day fighting tears, is easily diagnosed by a succession of doctors as depressed. When she refuses to take antidepressants, rejecting one doctor’s suggestion that her despair is merely “a medical matter of imbalanced chemicals”, she is abandoned by the overworked medical professionals. Left on her own, she remains unclear about whether her despair is a form of mental illness or of enlightenment. There are no answers here, but there is a reminder of the beauty that can be found when you allow yourself to look slowly and sadly at the world.